Review

Amulets and Armor is an excellent RPG that suffered the same fate as Wizards & Warriors: a game that has been in development far too long that it fell out of the technology curve when released. Similar to D.W. Bradley’s ill-fated masterpiece, Amulets & Armor boasts many innovative features that would have been called “groundbreaking” if released just a few years earlier. Your quest: defeat ‘big foozle’ Exiguus the Necromancer deep in the catacombs below Castle Arius. With a first-person perspective and somewhat pixellated VGA graphics, the game looks and feels similar to Bethesda’s classic Daggerfall, but with a whole new angle: co-operative multiplayer gameplay. You can work alone, or as a team with up to 4 human players over your local IPX network or modem. With a large fantasy campaign that spans over 30 levels, 3 different runic spellcasting disciplines, 11 different character classes, and more than one hundred unique items, Amulets & Armor will immerse you for hours on end—especially if you play with friends in co-op mode. Death-match play –probably the first in an RPG—is also available if you enjoy working against friends more than with them ;) With an excellent spellcasting system, intuitive interface, and innovative multiplayer options, Amulets & Armor ranks among one of the most obscure and underrated RPGs of all time, and it was a shame that the game was never marketed properly: it was released only as shareware, and sold less than 100 copies during its time according to this very interesting article at TheCan.org written by one of the designers.